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'Tis the season for wish lists, at least in our commercialized culture. In that spirit, I thought I'd put out a wish list of affordances for an imaginary LMS.
I want to be able to post grades right at the point of responding to the learner's posting of the assignment. I don't want to have to skip over several screens in order to punch in a grade. I want a running update of each learner's grade ...
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K-state is hosting the "Excellence in Teaching and Learning: Teachers as Learners" conference on Jan. 8. This day-long conference is the 4th annual teaching renewal retreat. To find out more about this event, visit the site at the following URL.
http://www.k-state.edu/catl/TeachersAsLearners.htm
The Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning is hosting this event.
Continue reading Excellence in Teaching and Learning: Teachers as Learners
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The fastest way to get people to scramble for something is to throw money out the window in one televised stunt. To achieve the same aims in academia, credit seems to do the trick. Getting a name on a project, protecting reputation as a "brand," and coining new terms and processes all seem to lead to a mad scramble. For many, "name" means greater access to resources, esteem, choice projects, and street credibility. The prestige piece has always been an ...
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One main task of an ID is to protect a project to its successful completion. The work of achieving this begins before even the first commitment is made. It begins with the client and the projected work. What's the true level of commitment to this project? What utility will it have upon creation? Does the instructor have the technological skills to carry off this endeavor? Do the administrators have the savvy and will to carry the project on to ...
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The features that make a game a strong one often enhances that game's efficacy as an elearning tool. An effective game needs to be engaging, playable and challenging; it shouldn't be confusing or unexciting. In the same way, a training game needs to be engaging in order to foster learning and skills acquisition and mastery. Training games are used in corporate and military environments to address new learning and to head off skills degradation.
(I would argue that ...
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Academics and theorists have discussed the self-organization theory of (informal) learning communities, with these creations identified as critical to lifelong learning. These grow not by any designed infrastructure per se but evolve on their own as people pursue their individual and shared interests. This concept relates to the one of the Internet evolving like a "tree," with its main trunk and branching off until the tips, where there are no nodes but tiny petioles. It's a form of the ...
Continue reading Stigmergy: Digital Crumbs a la Hansel and Gretel
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Back in the day, when I worked with my students who were building websites for clients, the conventional wisdom was to build in-house capacity in terms of information. This meant that they would do the research and collect the information needed and make it their own. They were not advised to link out to dynamic sites with relevant information because these sites could change their contents at any time. They could take a political turn that the students might not ...
Continue reading In-House Capacity or Reliance on the WWW Wilds
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Sometimes, the Internet acts like a live amorphous being ready to lash out at users who poke it. Okay, that's a little melodramatic. Maybe a lot melodramatic, but I've noticed some interesting issues.
Last month, I launched an online survey, and to publicize it, sent emails out through listservs and postings to various eLearning sites. I got maybe a couple dozen responses on the survey, which was a complex one, but also, I had ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
14 December 2006
E-Learning and the Science of Instruction By Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer Pfeiffer, A Wiley Imprint 2003 322 pp. hardcover
Drs. Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer have created an elearning niche, that of multimedia design as guided by behaviorist and cognitive research.
For many, multimedia evokes splashy effects and the best that digital technology can offer. Yet, when multimedia is applied for learning purposes, a more learning-grounded approach is effective. Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E ...
Continue reading Clark and Mayer: Multimedia Concepts (Brief Resource Review)
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Virtual reality consists of simulations. Users suspend reality in order to participate in this universe. Augmented reality consists of add-ons to the real-world.
The sci-fi version goes like this. A person puts on fashionable light-weight glasses empowered with cameras and displays. He or she goes into a live environment. The glasses collect information in the live environment and report that back to a computer. The computer generates informational overlays and details not available in the natural environment in ...
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So I just went through a learner-directed "automated" study of six online modules related to human subjects review. There weren't pre- or post- tests per se, but this blog entry may serve as a kind of post-test. (Let's just say I pass.) While the heading for this blog is playful, the contents of IRB trainings are not, often opening with painful reviews of historical abuses of people in various types of biomedical and other "research." The nuances of ...
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For the past several years, a series of articles in academic journals have engaged the technological strategies deployed for customizing or adapting learning for different learners. This, of course, is done by the faculty (some) in an instructor-led course. However, in automated courses, the instructional design and the technologies then come into play to try to achieve this. The research discusses various strategies from creating learning models to profile users (based on psychology, cognition, preferences, personality ...
Continue reading Educational Technology Standing in for the Live Instructor
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Representing information in different ways changes people's senses of reality. IDs have a suite of various authorware tools to present data - whether it be in tables, graphical representations, drawings, 3D models, audio-video, and a range of other data.
The Wikipedia offers a formal and informal definition of fractals. For my purposes, I'll quote their informal definition: "In colloquial usage, a fractal is a shape that is recursively constructed or self-similar, that is, a shape that appears similar at ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
02 December 2006
Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning (5th Ed.)* by Mark Grabe and Cindy Grabe New York: Houghton Mifflin Company 2007 431 pp. softcover
K-12 seems to be a less saturated market for elearning texts than higher ed. Mark and Cindy Grabes' Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning , now in its 5th edition, offers applicable educational technology insights for K-12. These authors come across as technology evangelists and predict that K-12 itself may restructure around technology. As veterans in the education trenches, the ...
Continue reading Grabe and Grabe: High Tech for K-12 Learning (Brief Resource Review)
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A recent book I read on creativity in design brought up the concept of "ritual attachments." These are ways of doing things that individuals make part of their habits, and even if more efficient and cleaner / safer / better ways of doing things are introduced, they may not be willing to try them. These authors offered a range of examples and showed how design has to take these into account if they're going to have new products get accepted. (One ...
Continue reading Ritual Attachments: Checks, Envelopes and ID Stuff
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I wouldn't have believed the following if it hadn't actually happened. My students and I were chatting about one thing or another when one of them mentioned that she weighed 350 pounds and had problems with her walking. The shock came not from any weight revelation but from my realizing that I'd forgotten that my students had bodies. We were engaging totally cognitively, and the other aspects of their lives had dropped away.
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So I was at a fair in Puyallup, Washington. In doing a basic walk-around to see what to sample, I noticed two people wearing full head-gear. They had some attachments to their arms and were jabbing at unseen fighters or adversaries in the hot afternoon, a few years ago. They seemed and were oblivious to the crowd around them. They reminded me of how people sometimes sing to themselves while wearing earbuds...and maybe rendering something out-of-tune ...
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Pre-Online Lurking Pre-online times, lurking had a very negative connotation. It suggested someone with ulterior motives scoping out a target or multiple targets. Now, the online version of "lurking" often is mentioned with a laugh. There's something charming about observing others in online space as a quiet non-participant.
Lurking Experience I've only lurked in online space once. I logged onto a parallel universe sort of site to check out its learning possibilities but probably didn't get past ...
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Many of us have had the experience of calling in to a government office or bank and having to go through layers of computerized voices before finally getting to a live person. Worse yet, if one is trying to reach a top-level decision-maker, there are often layers of gatekeepers between one and that person. Sometimes, with the growing automation of online learning, I think this may well be the scenario in trying to reach a live expert in a particular ...
Continue reading Finding the Human "You" in the Technologies
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by IDOS Newswire
19 November 2006
Eruditio Loginquitas will be presenting on "Online 'Live Personalization' of Learning and Implications for Learning Object Repositories and Automated eLearning" at the C2C Fall Forum Nov. 20 at Hutchinson Community College.
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Years ago, my UNDP supervisor greeted me with an astute observation, which I'll paraphrase. She essentially said, "I don't care what your motives are coming here, but it's really what you achieve on-ground that matters." Another saying has been, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Those who've applied systems theory analysis to the real-world know how often this saying applies to Northern countries' efforts in Southern countries' affairs. The complexity of the world ...
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So there it was in the news again. Craig Newmark of Craigslist had decided not to cash in on his famous lists used by people for their various selling - of things notable and not-so-notable - and then the various meet and greets - for (some) nefarious and other common purposes. Okay, so I've ever only sold one thing on Craigslist. One of my colleagues emptied out her whole store of antiques that she was selling for a downsizing effort. I've ...
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Disclaiming responsibility offers thin legal cover if a site engages in various misdeeds. That said, disclaiming is also de rigueur for most sites. Years ago when I was teaching a New Media writing course, one of our assignments was to review existing disclaimers on the WWW. We identified the various uses of disclaimers for content sites. These often addressed The type of information covered in the website The original intention of the website builders and owner for the proper use ...
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I was speaking with a chemical engineer, who mentioned research that had been done that surfaced some helpful information - but the data did not culminate into anything deeply useful. What was discovered would help researchers know which roads not to take in making particular materials, but did not result in a successful final product, so it was left to languish. She mentioned that there is a journal that publishes unreproducible results. The name of most scientific games is to find ...
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One of the major skills / talents of seasoned instructors (and some new ones) relates to their live "run-time adaptation." This computer term refers to the operation of a computer program. As applied to instructors, this relates to how an instructor leads and supports a group of learners. This involves a fair amount of complex multi-tasking and the nuances of reading human behavior and meaning (verbal and non-verbal). This run-time adaptation also involves a deep body of knowledge about a particular ...
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One of my more engaging projects has been a multi-state endeavor that involves teaching and course redesigns based on the cultural backgrounds and worldviews of a particular diverse group of learners. One of the tools that this community uses is a shared virtual site where individuals may share resources, hold conversations, post questions and observations, and feel a sense of connection to others involved in this shared labor.
One of the challenges of making this virtual group ...
Continue reading Virtual Spaces for Instructional Collaborators
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For many years now, companies have been talking about delivering etexts for a small fee (micropayments). Whatever is in the public domain will be downloadable for free, and online epublishers will sell what they can by well-known authors (such as the ground-breaking Stephen King who let one of his books be serialized and sold purely as an e-text). For my mass media course, we would talk about the changing technologies that enabled easier reading of foldable light e-book-readers and the ...
Continue reading Free Etexts and the Academic Textbook Companies
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One of the toughest challenges of launching an online course seems to be to define an eLearning path. "Where do I go?" seems to be a common query for those who may be taking an online course for the first time, and that's a very valid question. ELearning can be very disorienting.
One of the biggest tasks of an LMS is to provide a sense of an eLearning path albeit without imposing a pre-made structure. Some courses may have ...
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I returned from the E-Learn 2006 conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, which was from October 13-17. This was my first time to attend the E-Learn conference. I had registered to attend the tutorial sessions on Friday, (a day before the conference started for everyone). Each was scheduled for three hours. The first session I went to was "Blended Learning Situations, Solutions, and Several Stunning Surprises", by Curt Bonk, professor at Indiana University. He talked about blended learning and gave several examples ...
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One of my favorite memories about my doctoral students when I was teaching overseas was their enthusiasm and hard-working approach to the world. The classrooms, though, were another matter. Here I was in an agricultural university in the NE part of this country...and we used chalk and chalkboards, stencils and hand-typed texts, cassette tapes and tape players. The podium usually was constructed of wood and usually had some broken pieces, so one's leg could ...
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Definitely, this commentary will offend some. (If you're my direct supervisor, you can stop reading here.) It's a good thing I'm using a pseudonym. After I attended an international conferences on elearning, it's impossible not to feel like I work in a backwater. The irony is that I would feel the same wherever I was, probably, and whatever I was doing.
What was once cutting edge becomes passe very quickly in terms of digital functionalities. Building ...
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The pattern, it seems, is that there are ever more entrancing layers of assimilation into machine life. We're learning scripted behaviors by integrating with machines. We can immerse into our digital alter egos with ease. We can live out a whole day and never leave the digital cocoon. The machine world so far has been one of predictability, do-overs, the quick thrills, the visual / sensory overloads, and ...
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So celebrity usually doesn't affect me. I've met famous people and even talked to quite a few of them for the purposes of writing articles. I have a high threshold for the ga-ga factor. But sometimes, some modern celebs sort of push the mold, and so it was today.
One thing about Vinton Cerf that I liked right away was that he looked like his press photos. Usually, the mismatch is quite great, and if it weren't ...
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When we buy a piece of software, we pretty much assume that it'll be plug-and-play. Few of us read the manual first, and most just follow the directions for the upload and then noodle around until the pieces start coalescing into sense. The immense amounts of support that go into a software product's launch and the continuing help provided for its users often seem invisible to most users. Lately, I've been noticing this "digital bubble wrap" that ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
22 October 2006
The Society for Applied Learning Technologies (SALT) will be hosting a conference on New Techno in Orlando, FL in early 2007.
The Office of Mediated Education will be participating in this conference by sending a presenter.
http://www.salt.org/fl/orlando.asp
And if that's not enough, Disneyworld is nearby.
Continue reading SALT New Technologies Conference in Orlando, FL Jan. 31 - Feb. 2, 2007
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The Office of Mediated Education's LMS Axio (a.k.a. K-State Online) has a new branding site available at
www.axiolearning.org
Check it out.
A demo version of this software is available at
demo.axiolearning.org
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It's said that hindsight is 20-20. I'm not sure that it's ever 20-20. With so much "noise" in an environment, it's hard to get a clear read of a situation, even with many data points and effective triangulation of information.
I think back to a meeting my friend H. and I had with a college administrator, T.O. This administrator and I had spoken many years earlier ...
Continue reading On the Diving Board: eLearning and Risk Aversion
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e-Moderating: The Key to Teaching & Learning Online by Gilly Salmon London: RoutledgeFalmer 2004/2005 2nd Ed. 242 pp. softcover
The role of an e-moderator comes in handy in large online classrooms with the star professor and teaching / research assistants. An e-moderator would be a mix of a coach, mediator and a digital friend who also has a knowledge base of the subject matter. Dr. Gilly Salmon's e-Moderating: The Key to Teaching & Learning Online involves observations she made as an ...
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Building Educational Games and Simulations 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 25, Union 212. Sign up by 5 p.m. Monday, Oct. 23.
Ever want to jazz up your class with a learning game but just didn't know how to get started? Have you thought about building a simulation but thought it would cost too much money, time, and effort? Join Ben Ward, Instructional Designer for Office of Mediated Education, as we explore the basics of ...
Continue reading The Second Fall IDT Roundtable is on Oct. 25, 2006
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Faculty will ask, Well, if I want to use this video in a class, can't I upload it in my password protected online classroom? It'll be like me showing a video that I own in my face-to-face classroom. Another will ask, Can't I just upload an article to my online class? There are resources that I want to share with my students. In a recent grain science book, we put in the USDA's revised food pyramid ...
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Several academic articles that I've read of late have mentioned an engaging concept that has been around for a long time. The concept is simple: empower faculty to use multimedia to build their online courses and learning artifacts. Faculty have the SME knowledge and skill base. They often have instructional talent. They can use the technology to bring it all together and have a course exactly how they want it. They will have it all, rolled into one neat ...
Continue reading Empowering Instructors to do their own Multimedia Builds
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Pervasive or ubiquitous learning has been evolving with the explosion of new technologies from portable multimedia players to PDAs to cell phones, in a wifi environment. The concept seems to be not only lifelong learning but anytime-anywhere learning. In-class instructors have long struggled with trying to keep student attention in lecture halls where learners are multi-tasking on their laptops by checking email and TMing on their phones and scheduling on their PDAs. Now, instructors who create podcasts for deployment are ...
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So for the past few days, I've engaged in all sorts of conversations. There have been rollicking conversations with one of the learners in an online course about teaching online, and her contributions have been so substantive and pro-learning that she really is one of the honorary instructors. And then my supervisor served as "mystery guest" in our online classroom to engage learners in real-time conversations via the chat. Here, we practiced the protocols of speaking in real time ...
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Today marks the day that Axio Learning's first branding site has gone live! At this site are opportunities to meet others around the Midwest using this LMS...opportunities to demo and try this LMS...and designed experiences by many of the creative minds of OME. Check it out. http://www.axiolearning.org
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Having back-up speakers for a conference makes a lot of sense. Life happens, and people occasionally cannot show up to present on their expertise. People change their minds. They get sick. Their transportation fails. I'd submitted a paper for a national conference and received my first-ever alternate speaker offer. The offer came with free "tuition" for the conference and the promise that the work (a paper and a slideshow) would appear in the formal CD that came with the ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
02 October 2006
How much of yourself do you bring to a classroom?
As a writing / mass communications / literature instructor, I find my students and I will get into various types of unpredictable discussions. One of them led to the issue of identity and how much of a "self" is brought into a classroom. Their responses ranged from about 5% to 100%. The 100% responder said that he brought all of himself to the classroom and communicated all of himself wholeheartedly and without ...
Continue reading "Partial Identities" in Learning: Technologically Disaggregating Information
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At a recent conference I attended on interactive learning technologies, I noticed intriguing culture clashes among the participants. Four main identifiable groups were engaged in this conference. Most noticeable were those who worked within and for the military. These people brought some of the strongest minds in the field. They were able to design using cutting-edge technologies. They clearly had their own in-house software developers because of what they were able to deliver. They had cozy relationships with some private ...
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Anyone who has worked in digital space in curricular design has run up against the occasional mindlessness of such work. This mindlessness creeps in when there are hundreds or thousands of images to render. It creeps in when a project is at the stage when it needs final polishing before it goes live...and it's all about small fixes and corrections. Then there's the uploading of a curriculum onto a database or a course management system. It's ...
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A student-friendly tool for an online class is Week Zero or Pre-Week. Week Zero is the week prior to the first day of an online class. During this period. The online classroom is opened and made available to learners. Some instructors use it just to let learners acclimate to the learning management system (LMS).
Others proactively turn it into a review session. They design instructional paths for learners through the first week. They set up incentives to ...
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A prior blog addressed some of the "ruts" that may influence a course redesign, for all the hopes for a fresh change. Other challenges appear once the redesign has started.
Redesigning an online course often involves remaking various digital artifacts - learning objects, slideshows, lectures, interactive snippets, policies, and what-not. For others, learning objects may be refurbished by swapping out images, updating the language, switching in new slides for old ones, using new graphics, and putting in fresh film ...
Continue reading Course Redesign II: Digital Artifacts and Alignments
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The first IDTR for Fall 2006 will be this week. See below for details.
Have you heard of podcasting? Come and learn what podcasting is and how it works. How instructors around the country have utilized this powerful tool. Examples of podcasting used by other universities will be shared. We will discuss and share ideas on the future uses of podcasting.
Continue reading Instructional Design & Technology Roundtables (IDTR)
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Redesigning a course reminds me of a bicycle crash I had recently. I'll start with the crash and work backwards from that. So I was going around the local park's trail, which is paved partially with concrete (lots of broken pavement) and then also with dirt / mud / pebbles. I had ridden up on the grass median to give an elderly couple room to walk...and as I was merging back, the tires ...
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Whenever I go scouting for academic research articles on eLearning, I pay attention to the publications and their criteria for the peer review of articles. In a search recently, I realized that a pretty big-name ejournal had stopped publishing as of last year. The WWW had its old issues archived, and there were useful research pieces there, but there was something like a "ghost town" feel to it.
I thought about a former editor who started a military magazine for ...
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Part of the seductiveness of technology relates to the "Wizard of Oz" effect. This is that ability to multiply the effect of one's work as through a megaphone. It's the digital multiplier effect. It's about creating a big impression from modest means (you know Frank Baum's story with the wizard's identity eventually revealed). An example of a multiplier effect occurred at a presentation that I saw about a year ago. It was one on educational ...
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Some career fields apparently involve a goodly amount of waiting. There's filmmaking where there may be waiting on sets, people, lighting and what-not. There's road construction work - you know - where you can see several construction workers standing watching a fourth doing the actual work (well, sometimes). I got to thinking about this phenomenon of this think-do disconnect, which seems quite large sometimes in instructional design.
There's the initial meeting with the faculty member, some early probes regarding ...
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The Power of eLearning: The Essential Guide for Teaching in the Digital Age by Shirley Waterhouse Boston: Pearson Education 2005 262 pp. softcover
Dr. Shirley Waterhouse offers a practical and solid text on elearning that should win many over to this learning approach. From academia, she draws on sound principles: Chickering and Gamson's "Seven Principles...Undergraduate Education", Bloom's "Taxonomy of Intellectual Behaviors," and Gagne's "Nine Events of Instruction") and practices. From the business realm, she focuses on ...
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"May I borrow a cup of sugar?" That quote is used as a cliche of friendliness between neighbors. It's a quote that harkens back to the days when going to the store might be an imposition and not something as simple as bicycling over to the corner store or jumping into the car.
An ID sometimes ends up asking that question, "May I borrow...?" and "May I have...?" from pure strangers who work in a particular field. The request ...
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"Are you a medical doctor?" asked the man next to me on my airplane row. I was in 18F for all four flights I took to get from Kansas to DC and DC back to Kansas, so I was in my seat by the window sort of above the wing of the plane. It couldn't have been a white jacket and stethoscope. I was in jeans and some cotton top. I had been reading academic articles and dozing now ...
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At the SALT Washington Interactive Technologies conference held in late August, the gaming and simulation track consistently attracted a crowd. Given its popularity, I thought I'd share some highlights from some of the presentations. Gaming offers creative ways to promote education - in cognitive, affective and psychomotor ways.
The games ranged from multiple-choice frames with simple graphics to those with 3D backgrounds to video dramatizations with narrative voiceovers to dashboard simulators. The technologies now can offer some fairly ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
01 September 2006
Teaching and Learning at a Distance: Foundations of Distance Education (Third Edition)
By Michael Simonson, Sharon Smaldino, Michael Albright and Susan Zvacek
Upper Saddle River, Pearson
2000, 2003, 2006
360 pp. $51 soft cover
A book is often all about the right balance of ingredients. For those starting in to distance learning (yes, even at this late date), Teaching and Learning at a Distance would be a powerful resource.
Simonson, et al. offer the right amounts of theories, methodology, research ...
Continue reading The DL Guide: Teaching and Learning at a Distance (Brief Resource Review)
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Instructional designers work with the constant awareness that whatever they're building has a shelf life. Nothing will last forever. Little will last more than a few years. Something stays relevant only for a period, and at the same time learning contents are aging out, the learners who would potentially provide eyes on this material are evolving, and their learning needs are changing. Of course, many instructors hang on to their favorite learning materials long after their relevance. Indeed, I ...
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In a recent conference I attended, I noticed an engaging subtext. Given the tough competition for the LMS / CMS market in both K-12 and higher education, the various companies representing various LMSes were all scoping out the competition. In one presentation, I saw various reps from the various LMS-maker tables attending conferences showcasing each other's products and taking notes furiously onto laptops. There were strategic questions about functionalities. So why are the eportfolios linked to the various courses? What ...
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In an office that originates its own LMS, survey system, grade submission system, and other technologies, there is a major geek factor going on. And that rubs off on the instructional designers. I submit to you that my colleagues both have this geek characteristic although you'd never tell it by looking at them.
You can see that LCD glow on their faces when they get new hardware like tablet PCs. One of the IDs just got one with ...
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"It's my brother's paper, and I didn't know he cheated."
Professor Mary Pat McQueeney of Johnson County Community College spoke about plagiarism detection software. (This was at the SIDLIT / Summer Institute on Distance Learning conference on Aug. 3 - 4 at the Kansas University Edwards campus.) She identified some side benefits to such software. One is that publicity about the uses of such universal adoption of programs at an institution of higher learning may deter academic dishonesty and ...
Continue reading Age of the "Literate" Machines II: Plagiarism Detection
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English professors Maureen Fitzpatrick and Mary Pat McQueeney presented on software programs that ostensibly "grade" writing. (This was at the SIDLIT conference at the Kansas University Edwards campus on Aug. 3 - 4, 2006.) Apparently, various standardized testing outfits use such software. The development of such programs begin with measuring and quantifying elements such as English mechanics, writing organization, development, stylistics, and content. How would one begin to measure this? How would one be able to quantify this? Fitzpatrick explained that ...
Continue reading Age of the "Literate" Machines: Electronic Grading
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So here it was on a Saturday. It was go-for-launch day. Much like NASA with their launches, the weather and everything had come ...
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Writing about t - r in the context of instructional design seems to be inflammatory, potentially evocative of histrionics, and a little over-the-top.
I have a mental note that when I fly out to the SALT Washington Interactive Technologies conference in Virginia in a few days that I'll pack my toothpaste, sunscreen, lipstick and lotion in my check-in baggage. I'll drink my fill of juice before I board. I'll actually buy trial sizes for once...and do a ...
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So the SIDLIT (Summer Institute on Distance Learning" conference (Aug. 3 - 4) had an insightful presentation on different software programs that may convert PowerPoints to Flash. Davy Jones of Johnson County Community College offered some reasons for why this might be done. Converted files tend to be smaller and may download faster and be more email friendly. There's a broader availability of Flash which allows for deployment and play on Macs, PCs, and PDAs...and on various browsers. The ...
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How could the instructional designers (IDs) come together to build an online public-access course that people could come visit to learn more about the learning management system, AxioTM? The IDs would have to build using AxioTM. They would have to use copyright-released materials, many from KSU faculty (with their permission). They would have to show materials from a variety of curricular fields, with the learners ranging from K-12 through university. They would have to showcase some of the more common ...
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For almost half a year now, I've been in hot pursuit of a copyright release. This release is for certain intellectual property and templates used for designing digital learning objects. The company being pursued (although they seemed to hardly notice) is a large multinational one specializing in networking. The pursuit involved lots of phone calls, some toll free and some simply long distance. It involved emails and plenty of documentation. It involved working with three PIs, with two of ...
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People in customer service have to get tough. When they're faced with irate and frustrated customers, they can handle the issue by troubleshooting it and getting out of the way. Others will "get back" at the complainer with further delaying tactics, ignoring strategies, baleful looks or filing the complaint in the circular bin.
For the past several hours, I've been reading digitally archived complaints. These are textual ones submitted by email and web forms. I'm not ...
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As I've worked on more projects involving groups of dispersed stakeholders, I've come to a fundamental conclusion: people need something to shake a stick at.
This holds true even for those projects that originate on campus and evolve on campus - with various stakeholders scattered around various buildings. Often, the work shifts to virtual connections after the first meeting or two. Having lots of eyes on a project can be helpful in terms of its direction and its shaping ...
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One of my most engaging projects of late has been a national one involving the use of reusable learning object or RLOs. In this case, I used Cisco System's RLO model, with its rigorous standards. This work reminded me a lot of my days as a distance runner a long time ago and the pacing needed to make sure I could hit my marks. While I did not absolutely fill in every single blank in the tables needed to ...
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After all the sweltering heat yesterday, I am glad it's raining today. I have a million small tasks to complete before getting away from the office for two days to attend the 7th Annual SIDLIT (Summer Institute of Distance Learning and Instructional Technology) conference in Kansas City on Aug 3-4. I am excited and eager to present with my colleagues on the launching of the IDOS blog. I also plan to attend several sessions and have marked those sessions ...
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"Project creep" - in the industry parlance - tends to be something to be dealt with skeptically. It's something that is negative and risky. It's a black hole that can devour all sorts of energy, resources, employee goodwill and time. It can take over mental workspace, and it can turn a whole project soggy and incomplete. My argument here though is counterintuitive. Project creep has a positive side. As work progresses on a project, new information surfaces. Sometimes, that information ...
Continue reading Project Creep and Turning Points and Goodbye
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The pundits say that learning from and during failure is important. I'd agree, but it sure doesn't feel good. I've been thinking of academic publishing of late. I talk to professionals in the field who've had varying publishing experiences. One of the local profs here has no trouble landing his articles at will. He has quite a range of them - both co-authored and single-authored, and he's so settled in his tenure track that he breezily ...
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Bugginess has been on my mind lately. It's bugginess in terms of Kansas insects, with spiders that run incredibly fast, grasshoppers and an unusual bug on my window screen that was white and looked like it was wearing a fur (it had poor recovery skills when I flicked it off the screen, and I think it fell into my egress window well). Bugginess has been on my mind relating to a project I'm engaged in which has plenty ...
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It's rare that a workplace recommends a book to read, so it was with delight that I got into the email line for Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat, his "brief history of the twenty-first century" with its tongue-in-cheek title (2005). I suspect this book was recommended because it posits that areas that have few resources and riches will turn out people who can make opportunities for achievement in innovative ways. Kansas is pretty flat (except for ...
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There has always been a price to pay for the attainment of knowledge, whether it's time or money, now we can add our eyes as payment as well. Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) is a growing problem that is affecting more and more of all of us. There was a time, only a few years ago, when this document would have at the very least been written out in rough draft form on paper, then typed out on a typewriter ...
Continue reading Computer Vision Syndrome - The Price of Knowledge?
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"Amid the turmoil and tumult of battle, there may be seeming disorder and yet no real disorder at all; amid confusion and chaos, your array may be without head or tail, yet it will be proof against defeat. Simulated disorder postulates perfect discipline; simulated fear postulates courage; simulated weakness postulates strength. Hiding order beneath the cloak of disorder is simply a question of subdivision; concealing courage under a show of timidity presupposes a fund of latent energy; masking strength with ...
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So it's the weekend again, and a few cars pull in and out of the parking lot driveway. I'm vaguely aware of others working in the building. Sometimes, I'm only aware that they've left because I've tripped the building's alarm system, which they set as they left. (The motion detectors are just sort of there, but they light up to let me know that the movement has been recorded.) The weekend is a great ...
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Software development often happens in a siloized way. Except for instances when international or national organizations take a lead on standards-setting or a mega-corporation ends up in a semi-monopolistic situation with a software program, there often are many versions of a thing...and the versions often don't talk to each other. They're interoperable. They're stand-alone.
A recent article by Nicholas L. Carroll and Rafael A.Calvo of the U of Sydney ("Certified assessment artifacts for ePortfolios") addresses ...
Continue reading Necessary Functions of an ePortfolio System
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So I just got spammed another round. It's sort of strange to get these emails with apparently word-generator-created subject lines that make no human sense. And while I haven't opened one of these in ages, the contents never seemed to make any sort of rational sense either. I have wondered why people would generate these, or if this is just some sort of scripting run wild (sort of like virus strands). The only thrill seems to be the ...
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So my client flipped on me. Well, it's not as bad as that might sound. She didn't "flip out." What I mean is that one of my clients changed her mind again about what she wanted for a course. A fair amount of graphic design work is lost with her decision-making. Consultation with the domain master of a database has been lost. The enthusiasm for a particular effect and branding look/feel has dissipated. The mental space I ...
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by Brent Anders
12 July 2006
Learning Styles have become exceedingly common at all levels of academia, yet are Learning Styles real and if so, are they so important that instructors should spend time addressing the issue? The answer is a bit complex but attainable through a thorough understanding of the real issue at hand. The phrase "Learning Styles," is generally defined as a "model [that] classifies students according to where they fit on a number of scales pertaining to the ways they receive and process ...
Continue reading Are Learning Styles Simply A Myth? - If not, are they really that important?
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The chemical engineer sat across from me in the coffee shop. We had two scones and two coffees there on the table, and also a napkin on which she was writing. She was drawing circles and lines of trajectories to represent her studies. She wrote a symbol for a particular chemical that she was representing. She spoke of environmental sustainability and pharmaceuticals. She spoke of synthesizing catalysts and nanomaterials and other mysteries of the universe. Just the day before, I ...
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If one walks through the neighborhood at pretty much any time of day, one can hear a wide range of dogs barking. There's the Gus Welcome, which comes along with a frantic run up and down a fence and some 80 pounds of German shepherd hurling itself against a new fence and bending part of it into the neighbor's yard. There are the yappies. There are mysterious growls coming through doors. It was on one such walk - dog-sitting ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
05 July 2006
Managing E-Learning Strategies: Design, Delivery, Implementation and Evaluation By Badrul Khan 2005 426 pp. $69.95 soft cover Information Science Publishing
E-Learning QUICK Checklist By Badrul Khan 2005214 pp. $29.95 soft cover Information Science Publishing
Dr. Badrul Khan's textual resources offer a general look at eLearning through the lens of his 8-category model: "institutional, management, technological, pedagogical, ethical, interface design, resource support, and evaluation" aspects. These, he asserts, are "logically comprehensive and empirically the most useful dimensions for ...
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An occasional goal of online learning instructional designers is to raise the techno-literacy of learners. While many learners use a variety of technologies---often in ways that befuddle their instructors---many do not see through the technology to understand the structures and processes behind the practical glitz. There may be a reification of the technologies, such as the early cyberspace writings on how the Web is a god, not human connections and synergies via electronic communications (phone lines ...
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Inexplicable things happen in a complex universe. In digital space, this human-made mass of data and interaction and messiness, mysterious occurrence happen as a matter of course. In a word processing program, my text suddenly starts to puddle. I receive mysterious programmer messages from the great beyond, which then takes some online research to find out what that means. Files disappear into cyberspace. I wonder if they'll morph and come back in a different form Internet years later. (in ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
27 June 2006
"In any class that you have, a third of the people are good writers; a third need more work, and about a third are going to take hours." -- Gail Tremblay
Given that the course that Gail Tremblay would be a SME on would be online, our conversation moved to the work of building community online. As she noted, the quality of an online learning experience depended in part on who the learners are and ...
Continue reading Forming Community Online in a Writing Course (Q&A with Gail Tremblay)
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In a recent book, I came across some models of online course development. While these are by no means comprehensive, these do offer some perspectives on how courses may be put together---on and by teams, collegially, and otherwise---beyond the lone ranger approach.
Boutique course development (Hartman and Truman-Davis, 2001) "A professor approaches an instructional support unit for professional assistance on an individual, one-on-one basis from an instructional designer or technology support person. As Hartman and Truman-Davis explain, this is a ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
24 June 2006
A conversation had come up during the Enduring Legacies and WAOL Online Course Redesign conference. One of the biology instructors asked the group how they introduced topics that were controversial in an online classroom. While the conference participants did address this issue, I decided to pose it to Gail Tremblay, whom I was meeting the day after the conference in her home in Olympia. In particular was the question of approaching evolution.
Tremblay laughed and ...
Continue reading Handling Controversial Topics in a Writing Course (Q&A with Gail Tremblay)
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E-Learning Companion: A Student's Guide to Online Success by Ryan Watkins and Michael Corry The George Washington University Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company 2005 188 pp. wirebound softcover
Dr. Ryan Watkins and Michael Corry's E-learning companion helps a modern young college learner segue into online learning. This text serves as a college study skills handbook with college tutorials and foundational insights on online learning. Taking a practical approach, these authors advise online learners to annotate readings to strengthen their ...
Continue reading E-Learning Companion (Brief Resource Review)
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So a fair amount of research dollars have gone into natural language systems, AIs, and computerized intelligent agents. When I call some phone systems for information, I get the automated voice that directs me to where I want to go. At the grocery store, I check out my items by interacting with a canned digital voice. My banking is done online, but if I need to go to the phone, there's that same digital voice. I can go to ...
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Gail Tremblay's approach to teaching writing is very conducive to a learner-centered approach. I suspect her style has evolved from her being a considerate human being foremost and then an artist and a writer. Her generosity in agreeing to be one of my two SMEs on a course redesign (English Composition 1) and then inviting me to her home in Olympia, Washington, were both gestures of fine kindness.
The following then are some highlights from our half-day chat.
A ...
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How much is enough? It is said that we Americans have a hard time defining sufficiency. In research terms, enough is when one can draw a statistically significant conclusion (for quantitative research). It's when triangulation of data seems to point in a particular direction with some measure of confidence (for qualitative research). With so much data available online, it's not that hard to find another mother lode of relevant information. One twist to a term may open up ...
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Teaching Online: A Practical Guide (College Teaching Series) by Susan Ko and Steve Rossen Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company 2004 339 pp. softcover
Even at this late date, there are many instructors who are approaching online learning. Maybe every generation will have its newcomers to an idea or a practice. Dr. Susan Ko and Steve Rossen's Teaching online suggests that DL may be a panacea for virtually everyone. This text seems to suggest that the process is mechanistic. If only ...
Continue reading Ko and Rossen's Teaching Online (Brief Resource Review)
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So my students have said to me. So new acquaintances have quipped. I assume that there are others who say and do this without nary a comment. The assumption is that the caching of Google's prodigious servers captures some angle of a person that he/she wouldn't reveal otherwise. Certainly, I've seen sufficient articles to know that a solid detective can ferret out all sorts of financial, health, and other pseudo-personal information from the WWW. Those who ...
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In my years in the classroom, I've always thought it was one of the highest compliments to dream big for my students. (My students didn't always think so.) I think it's important to expect much for them to live up and aspire to. This thought came up again recently as I was reading program literature for the Evergreen State College's (TESC) Reservation-Based program. Their brochure reads in part:
"Program faculty believe that we best meet students ...
Continue reading Dreaming Big, Planning for the Real and Seeing Truth
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Designing World-Class E-Learning: How IBM, GE, Harvard Business School, & Columbia University are Succeeding at e-Learning By Roger C. Schank, Ph.D. New York: McGraw-Hill $34.95 hardcover 2002
Using a folksy, anti-establishment tone, Roger C. Schank, Ph.D., offers real-world case studies of e-learning projects. Along the way, he drops some pretty famous names of corporations and higher education learning institutions. The pedagogical goals: true-to-life, cost-effective, relevant, and connected to learners. What follows are rich anecdotes from the e-learning design ...
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For fans of KSU Football Coach Ron Prince and Dr. Susan M. Scott, leadership professor, there's a course forthcoming this Fall 2006.
More information on this is available through the following URL.
http://www.dce.ksu.edu/leadership/
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In journalism, I learned that publicity isn't all it's cracked up to be. It doesn't suddenly make a person more real. It doesn't improve character. It doesn't enhance a poorly-conceptualized project. It doesn't necessarily bring any outpouring of sympathy. It doesn't promote justice if the levers of that weren't in place to begin with. It doesn't combat apathy, except in rare cases. Media attention doesn't change fundamental ...
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So my former doctoral advisor and professor is moving on. The news came in an email almost a year from the date I graduated from the Seattle University doctoral program. The announcement led to a flurry of group emails, many lamenting the move and worrying about the quality of the program with this change. Others started organizing a farewell dinner. It turns out that my former advisor will be a couple states away from me now instead of half a ...
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One way to remember an experience well is to get stood up. And there I was at the auction house looking at any number of pieces of furniture and jewelry and heirlooms being marched across the stage, highlighted under the stage lights, and shown by camera to the live audience. I was on 3rd Avenue in Seattle, and I was waiting for a colleague who hadn't shown up. (He did later, after I'd left.) He was a fantastic ...
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The Enduring Legacies Reservation-Based Program Course Redesign Conference in Seattle introduced a wonderful approach to course redesign - that seems revolutionary and "but of course" at the same time. This course redesign involved student feedback. This wasn't feedback collected in an impersonal survey format alone, but was based on lurking on online courses, attending face-to-face classes, study leader experiences with learners, quarterly interviews of students, staff and faculty, and other means. The in-person sharing of ideas strengthened learner insights. The ...
Continue reading Listening to Learners in the Course Redesign
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"I tend to try to help people to address whatever it is they need to address...I like to make assignments where people have a way of making it their own, whatever it is. I want them to make it their own." -- Gail Tremblay
"In the Indian community like in all communities, different people have different interests and strengths, and just like among European-Americans, there are great physicists and mathematicians...I make sure my students know that they are not ...
Continue reading A "SME" for Building Curriculum for Native American Learners
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Engaging the Online Learner: Activities and Resources for Creative Instruction by Rita-Marie Conrad and J. Ana Donaldson Jossey-Bass: A Wiley Imprint 2004 129 pp. softcover
Some people have the social skills to get groups of people to warm up and mingle, say, at a party. Drs. Rita-Marie Conrad and J. Ana Donaldson are just those sorts of people albeit in online eLearning spaces. In asynchronous courses, instructors need to build community, set up virtual teams and engage learners. Engaging the ...
Continue reading Engaging the Online Learner (Brief Resource Review)
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Dr. Roberto H. Bamberger, a Government, Education, and Public Health Briefing Consultant with Executive Engagement and currently working with Microsoft Corp., suggests that eLearning may lead to a global exchange of ideas and the combined wisdom of people from various cultures, in a sense echoing Tim Berners-Lee's idealistic ideas for the WWW.
In his AAC&U plenary presentation "Creating Spaces for Learning: Exploring Technology's Role," he envisioned a world where technology is applied to solve shared challenges.
He ...
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Dr. Joan Lippincott of the Coalition for Networked Information suggested a multi-pronged approach to eLearning space design by considering learning principles, disciplinary applications of eLearning, the Net Gen style, and various environments. Deep learning should entail a social component, be active, contextual, engaging and "student-owned," she suggested. This new generation of learners enjoys figuring out their own learning instead of just drawing from experts. They prefer multi-media to text. They enjoy working in groups, and they multi-task as a matter ...
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A number of software programs have been released to identify and head off plagiarism. Some of these archive digitized learner papers into a database against which they compare other papers. These programs will identify points of similarity. These have not been without problems---as many learner complaints and copyright infringement assertions have been made about these programs. It may well be the low-tech solutions that will carry the day.
Drs. Mary Slavin and Roseanne Torsiello of Berkeley College, presenters at an ...
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Malcolm Brown (of Dartmouth College) in "Trends in Learning Space Designs" offered some fresh insights on the building of so-called "learning spaces". He noted that space might be construed as a "continuous area or expanse that is free, available, or unoccupied," and also as "the freedom and scope to live, think, and develop in a way that suits one." Both definitions shimmer and interact in the design of digital learning spaces. He defined various learning spaces. Some are formal ones ...
Continue reading Physical and Digital Learning Space Designs
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One of the more engaging poster presentations at the recent AAC&U conference engaged the use of human patient simulators in nursing. Dr. Paula Dunn Tropello's "Interactive Learning with Human Patient Simulators" shed light on the practical use of human patient simulators, which have grown in complexity.
I'd recently had a brief run-on with a simulated baby when I was at an open house at KSU. I was at a table introducing eLearning when a young woman came ...
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For the longest time, I'd wanted to read The Art of War. I'd already read quite a few Chinese classics, which often dealt with feudal warfare and then familial warfare. And now, without hundreds of student papers to read every other day, I found myself at the library with a copy of this ancient tome in hand. I came across the following passage on foreknowledge.
*"What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and ...
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So last Friday night ended up spent in a cavernous theatre on opening day for Mission Impossible 3. The movie was typical MI fare. Going with university instructors (most with Ph.D.s), I noticed some snorts of derision and some eyeball rolling...but lest I give too much of the movie away, I'll just say that I went because I was having an MI type of work week. People in sales know that a lot of ...
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We heard Dr. Michael Wesch (professor of anthropology) talk about tags at the last IDTR. I spoke to a few people after the session, and realized they didn't fully understand about tags. This inspired me to write something about it in our blog and do some research too.
This is what Wikipedia says about Tags. If you Google the word "tags", you get some 7 million hits. But most of us, just need to understand the basics and how ...
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There are moments when I'm completely baffled. This doesn't happen often, and it doesn't happen for long stretches. A few weeks ago, I inherited a database, fiscal responsibilities, a load of social relationships---all in a volunteer position related to a homeowners association. With that came QuickBooks and a method of accounting that was theoretically straightforward...but the database itself was built idiosyncratically. People's names were listed willy-nilly, some by their last names, some by the first ...
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Creativity in Virtual Teams: Key Components for Success By Jill E. Nemiro The Collaborative Work Systems Series, Center for the Study of Work Teams 2004 San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Pfeiffer 314 pp. softcover
The Fifty Feet Rule of Collaboration "The probability of people communicating or collaborating more than once a week drops off dramatically if they are more than the width of a basketball court apart." - Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps (1997, p. 6) in Virtual Teams
Film editor ...
Continue reading Creativity in Virtual Teams (Brief Resource Review)
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For all the emphasis on digital teaching and learning, there's plenty of focus on the creation of F2F (face-to-face) learning spaces for instructors and learners. One new/old concept was that of the studio classroom. Such studios enable an instructor to watch others learn, so he/she can make better decisions on how to structure the learning environment.
A studio classroom is a collaborative place with plenty of computers organized around clustered desks, so ...
Continue reading Studio Classes: "The Space Should Look like the Doing."
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My fifth month into this job as ID, I've heard plenty of stories about clients. Some have been complimentary - about the complexity of curricular builds, creative interactive assignment building, innovative uses of AxioTM LMS, graciousness in working with the IDs, and any number of other insights.
There, too, are the stories of clients who use online space merely to deliver "shovelware" digital contents. There are those who are reluctant to teach online and so foot-drag until the last minute ...
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e-portfolios has been a term used for various digital compendiums of learner work. There are various software programs for the compilation of such portfolios. Others simply use websites and some back-end basic programming.
The idea is that learners need to "think" with artifacts that convey their thoughts coherently---mixing words, images, sound, and even video. There should be a clear sense of audience and purpose in these portfolios. To be deployed well ...
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Earlier that Saturday morning, people had been bringing their luggage down to the concierge's desk. This was the third day of a three-day conference that had been intense. It had been full of presentations, roundtables, a reception, a poster session, and various keynote addresses.
Now, it was later afternoon, and others were catching flights across the country. A ragtag band of participants convened in the West Room of the Third Floor of the Renaissance Hotel in Seattle.
They were ...
Continue reading Social and Cultural Implications of Education with Technology
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I got an email from one of my supervisors on a national curriculum design project, and she let slip that she thought I was going on vacation for six days. I was actually hitting the road to present at a national teaching and learning conference in Seattle on my dissertation research (on the role of trust in instructor-led online college courses).
Anyway, I started thinking about all the work that one usually does while on the road. That doesn't ...
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Sometimes, going to a national conference on technology and learning seems to be an exercise in joyful daydreaming. The endeavors tend to be high-minded. Administrators and instructors will talk about standardizing instructors' electronic presentations. They'll talk about setting up standards for online learning across the campus. They'll talk about having instructors do their own multimedia builds. Setting up that alignment between people in an organization may be quite a challenge. Making change is terrifically hard work.
One exercise ...
Continue reading Force-Field Analysis re: Online Learning on Campuses
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
27 April 2006
Debriefings are often used in learning---to reinforce the main ideas. It's often helpful after a conference to unpack the overloaded suitcases and backpacks to find what the takeaways are from the meeting.
From the Association of American Colleges and University (AAC&U) conference "Learning and Technology: Implications for Liberal Education and the Disciplines" in Seattle (Apr. 20 -- 22, 2006), I ended up with folders of materials, a dozen business cards, lots of URLs, and ideas---plenty of them. The challenge ...
Continue reading White Asparagus, PowerPoints, and Per Diem: Conference Debriefing
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When an LMS gets extremely popular, it becomes used 24/7 daily, which means there's no down time except for the mere slices when changes may be made. Programmers know when they have the most traffic to their servers, and they assiduously avoid using those times to upload and update. However, every so often, updates need to be made without much prior warning. And those are done in short stints.
Such an update was made to an LMS (which ...
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Susan Patrick, the former Director of the Office of Educational Technology of the US Department of Education, spoke at the Beach Museum of Art on Apr. 26 to a receptive crowd. Her talk related to K-state's strengths as an institution of higher education.
Drawing on her national and international level work, she observed that Mexico took three years to digitize its K-12 curriculum in order to maximize their ability to educate its populace.
She shared other inspirational examples and ...
Continue reading Online Teaching and Learning for Global Workforce Training
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I was speaking to Nick deKanter, VP of Muzzy Lane Software (http://www.muzzylane.com/). His company creates educational software games of varying complexity for the liberal arts.
One complaint of online games is that many are necessarily closed-systems. Players choose limited options. There are only so many factors that may be played or input, and every game is bounded. Real-time interactive live-player games add open-systems complexity by the addition of the other ...
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For any number of online classes and curriculums, it's a struggle to find sufficient raw materials for the development. Finding images with copyright releases can be a challenge. People's promises of sending images may sort of drop off their mental agendas, and voila---nothing. Resources may be handed over but often without the metadata needed for integration into a project. Sometimes, an ID gets so desperate that she has to go out into the field herself with a ...
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As a new young instructor with the UNDP in PR China (my third and fourth years there), I'd been getting subtle hints that a prior American instructor hadn't come across so well. For a while, my students would avoid telling me outright what it was that made her somewhat distasteful to them. Since she was on their minds, I knew I would eventually get the story. The story went like this...and the reasons ...
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An unavoidable truth on university and college campuses is that (at one level) it's all about the Benjamins. The very direct administrators will own up without much prodding, and then it's all about filling the course rolls with paying students. The secondary concern has to do with the learning needs of students and their "takeaways." For a purist, that's sort of going to the dark side. As a person who has been around a while in the ...
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Those who are in the freelance writing gig know this. One seldom starts writing a work with an editor who has a place for that work and possibly a check in the mail. Usually, a freelancer ends up maybe with a semi-encouraging response, if that. Then, it's all about writing the work and hoping it finds a home.
I think freelancers all have had articles written that got accepted but never appeared---or at least the editor never did the ...
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I can empathize with my colleagues when it comes to working with technology. I spent a good chunk of last week creating an example of a simulated message board with annotations for our Demo course for Axio Learning Online. Although it sounds like a very simple task, it has quite a few layers to it. First, you have to create an instructor (at least one, but there can be more) and several students in the course. Then you have to ...
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There's little doubt that alpha and beta testing are important parts to the design process. There must be a procedure to evaluate whether a multimedia design is working or not.
For years, my former students in "Writing for New Media" had set up alpha and beta tests. They had test-run their sites. Some of them went live and built up a following. Others never went live, just sort of existed in electronic portfolios and student sample work DVDs. I ...
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Chaos theory was one of the more unusual things my doctoral cohort at Seattle University addressed. It's a theory---broadly summarized---that suggests that chaos is a natural part of life and the world, and being able to find the creativity and form in chaos is part of leadership. I was thinking about this in the context of starting new projects with clients.
Starting a new project almost always entails a period of muddle-ness. The muddle-ness refers to who the members ...
Continue reading Muddle-ness: Being Comfortable with Amorphousness
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Recently, a gamer magazine arrived at my house. It was full of vivid images: a computerized Vin Diesel in full action as a "spy," a Lara Croft out to get the scoundrels, fighting characters with their unique characteristics and styles, and lots of game developer lingo. I thought that since the magazine had arrived, I'd better check it out before consigning it to the recycle pile in the garage. I dutifully perused it.
Then, I thought about the think-do ...
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Anyone who has dealt with technologies has had moments of stupefaction. I'm sure of it. I just had one on Saturday. I was uploading images into a database (hosted off another out-of-state university) when I kept getting graphics boxes that wouldn't accept an image...and wouldn't disappear. I could move them around, and they just sat there shadowed and unresponsive.
I could live with some computer garbage, I thought. Then, the whole thing froze. And I was ...
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OME is no yoga chant. It's the Office of Mediated Education where I work, lured away from tenure and the big city and bright lights of Seattle.
So I'm a newbie here, if I can say that about three months in. I still feel like a newbie. And coming fresh from a program that had a major study angle on organizational culture, I thought I would apply some of that to my surroundings.
First off, working in a ...
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The videos on Is It Different? Online vs. Face-to-Face Instruction (Feb. 22, 2006) and Online Assessment and Student Learning Outcomes (Jan. 26, 2006) are ready.
To watch go to http://id.ome.ksu.edu/roundtable/
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The most recent issue of the Journal of Interactive Instruction Development has an article by one of the bloggers titled "Using Archives to Analyze Online Curricular Structures at a Community College." This discusses an instrument used to analyze 22 archived courses of some faculty at Shoreline Community College in Washington State and the interactivity that could be observed stemming from the "curricular structures" there. The course subject matters covered a range of freshman and sophomore courses--from the sciences, humanities, and ...
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It seems like in every discussion for selecting technologies that decision-makers have to vote between one platform or another, or go platform agnostic. They have to play off against others in commercialism... They have to figure what combinations to configure for service to learners. They have to decide what would best serve their users' needs.
The temptation is to remain non-committal. After all, any decision made means an investment in staff time, mental space, hard work, server space, potential licensing ...
Continue reading Platform Agnosticism and ID Development on Technologies
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A number of faculty and staff have contributed to the IDT (Instructional Design Technology) Roundtables, and they deserve our thanks and kudos.
Others who've contributed to make this blog real include: Rob Caffey, Scott Finkeldei, Joshua Works, Andrea Mendoza, and others.
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Many head into projects by doing "rapid prototyping", which often means getting into the technologies and starting the work right away. Some people are brilliant this way, and they can do all that front-end work in their heads...and while they're actually creating. They're willing to go through the messiness of creation and then fixing things iteratively.
That's not a talent that I have. I can, but the messes I make in creation mean more back end ...
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Here's a fine compendium of scholarly resources, referred to me by one of my supervisors.
http://www.scholar.google.com
And I ran across a reference to the Dspace resources of MIT, which is built on open source as a digital repository of shared information.
http://www.dspace.org/
One of my favorites for whenever I'm working on a government project is Acronym Finder.
http://www.acronymfinder.com
There are bazilliions of resources online, but these are two ...
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The nightmare scenario (as has been told to me) goes like this. A faculty member calls up, and an appointment with an instructional designer is made. The instructor shows up with a giant box of printed materials and says, "I want to teach online. Could you help me digitize all these files?" Don't look now, but we're in the middle of the Techno Information Age.
Handling large amounts of information, particularly outside one's field of expertise, seems ...
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April 20 (Thur.), 2006 11:00AM - 12:30 PM K-State Union 212
Have you ever thought about using groups in your online class, but weren't sure how to do it? Ever curious about what kinds of activities work well with online groups? Come join us as we walk through the basic "how to" steps for creating and facilitating online groups and then discuss strategies and best practices.
For more information go to the Instructional ...
Continue reading IDT Roundtable - Maximizing Online Student Groups
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Gatekeeping as a concept makes sense. There are times when some people should have access to particular information and other times when they don't really need to know. I thought of this recently when I got turned away by some army folks at the nearby military base. It turns out I didn't have the full documentation needed to gain entry, and they were right. When I returned in the afternoon with the proper documentation, they very graciously gave ...
Continue reading Gatekeeping, Keys and Trying to get on Base
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Last week, I talked about the presentation from FETE on arousing curiosity in students, in class. Today, I will share some tips I got from the discussion. Before I talk about it, I would like to say these are by no means my ideas, but ideas/comments from everyone in the presentation.
Here is a summary of the tips that was voiced in the presentation ( in no particular order):
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One of my favorite books in my recent spate of studies had to do with Annalee Saxenian's Regional Advantage, which discussed the "culture and competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128" (ripped from the book's subtitle). This author examined how Silicon Valley came out ahead because of its proximity to major institutions of higher learning like Stanford University and the synergies that come from informal and formal alliances and the sharing of knowledge. By contrast, Route 128 is ...
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Part of the culture of the WWW has included that of anonymity. I thought of this recently when I went to Craigslist to post a potential rental property. A person named "EW" contacted me via email, and I emailed back for some details of which university this student was going to be attending. This "student" rushed to commit to the space but had no personal details. I emailed back that the space would be here for her when she showed ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
23 March 2006
Back in the day when I was an undergraduate at the UDub (University of Washington), I took a course which required a team approach to a term project. It was a research project that required plenty of fieldwork. I raised my hand and asked our instructor if I could do the project alone. I had the tools and was efficient and really felt that having teammates would slow me down and lower the project quality. The instructor interrupted the class ...
Continue reading Pros and Cons to the "Lone Ranger" Approach to Online Course Design
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A template is a "pattern or gauge," a document or file having a preset form used as a "starting point." A template has other meanings, too, in biochemistry and carpentry, but this will do for now.
Efficiency in online space often stems from thoughtful use of forms and templates. Technologies allow for the exchange of various templates and their diverse customization. In one of the projects that I'm involved in, a fair amount of time and thought have gone ...
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I went to the Faculty Exchange Teaching and Excellence (FETE) presentation on March 9, 2006, by Dr Jim Eison (University of South Florida), an expert on this topic.
Jim spent 15 minutes talking about the topic before involving us in an activity. He gave us a sheet of paper with three questions to answer: one way we could arouse curiosity about a course at the start of a term, one way to attempt to arouse curiosity during class sessions, and ...
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I was reading a book on technology in education recently, and the authors observe that "work and university study have always been closely related" (A.W. Bates and G. Poole, 2003, p. 17). That got me to thinking about how we actually design for student employability. (Research says that employers tend to be more leery of degrees earned totally online vs. those that involve some face-to-face time.)
To be employable, people need a sense of self-discipline and polish. They need ...
Continue reading Instructional Design for Student Employability
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At KSU's Office of Mediated Education website, there are links to various resources that may be helpful for IDs.
http://ome.ksu.edu/id/
Kansas State University's main page may be accessed at the following URL:
http://www.k-state.edu/
Feel free to check out these resources. You may also learn more about the three bloggers at the OME site.
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All the recent press coverage about the territoriality of those in law enforcement ...and the efforts from the top to encourage more sharing of information probably rings true for the many of us who are not in law enforcement. Information tends to silo. Those who feel that their professional standing is linked to what unique pockets of information and talents they have will not likely want to share what they know with others.
In academia, at least at the college ...
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Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy is used to represent different levels of learning, with the highest as the ability to evaluate, while drawing on all the prior levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Some would argue that an even higher level would be that of creativity, innovation, seeing beyond what has already been and is to uncharted territories.
Certainly, the ability to make new mental connections and to see unexploited opportunities could well lead to benefits in a number ...
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As I was clicking through the web pages of this years SXSW INTERACTIVE, suffering a touch of jealousy, I stumbled across what might be the next great thing on the web. By way of Amanda Congdon's vlog, I was introduced to allpeers, an up-and-coming, peer-to-peer application that runs through your Firefox browser. If the developers follow through with their claims, especially about not including any spyware or adware with their product, allpeers may finally make peer-to-peer networking accessible to ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
16 March 2006
I sometimes think about when I first became aware of my own learning and sense of being. I always come back to the age of 10 as the time when a greater awareness of myself and others seemed to emerge. Of course, that was only the first glimmer. In the ensuing years, there have been moments of greater learning and self-awareness. It probably wasn't until I was some years into college education as an instructor that the issues of ...
Continue reading The Importance of Meta-Cognition regarding Learning Styles and Preferences
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An online instructor may breathe "life" into a course through his/her enthusiasm, experiences, personality, instructional design, and sheer telepresence. The communications and interactivity in such courses enliven and enrich the learning. Online instructors may often be the linchipin of the learning experience.
In academia, there is not often a lot of opportunity to use "boxed" pre-made digital courses. Simply, faculty are rather hands-on in their teaching, and they tend to be skeptical of the effectiveness of online courses without ...
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A wonderful online teacher, colleague and friend, Ann Murray, sent me this fun link. Electronic Arts (EA) has divvied-upped its characters and animation from "The Sims" video game for Carnegie Mellon University to use with their Alice programming language. This is a HUGE contribution and ought to give lot more mileage to the learning experience for beginning programmers.
But that is not all EA has been up to. They are on the verge of releasing a wondrous product built on ...
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Much of first (early)-generation online learning is highly text-based. This means that learners have to engage their reading minds to understand the concepts, facts and practices.
Reading, a common staple of adult education, is more complex than many realize. Tony Buzan in Use Both Sides of Your Brain identifies seven steps in the process of learning (Boyles and Contadino 102). Being aware of the complexity of reading will help instructors provide the necessary support for adult learners in their ...
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March 30 (Thur.), 2006 11:00AM - 12:30 PM K-State Union 212
Blogging is an excellent way to encourage students to process and apply what they've learned - but there are possible hazards and pitfalls instructors must look out for! We'll show you how to start a blog and use it in your classes, and spend a little time exploring the ins and outs of the Blogosphere. Presented by Mike Ribble, Shalin-Hai Jew, Ben ...
Continue reading IDT Roundtable - What the Heck is a Blog and Do I Need One?
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by ID Alochona
13 March 2006
I am on the listserve for C2C, and this is what I received recently:
The 7th Annual Summer Institute on Distance Learning and Instructional Technology (SIDLIT) is scheduled for Thursday and Friday, August 3-4, 2006 at the University of Kansas - Edwards Campus in Overland Park, Kansas. SIDLIT is coordinated jointly by the Colleague to Colleague and Johnson County Community College. Each year SIDLIT focuses on instructional technology and distance education with presentations, hands-on training workshops, and special-interest break-out sessions. More ...
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The buzzwords at the Educause Annual Conference in Orlando, last year was blogging, RSS feeds and readers. Even though everyone was talking about RSS at last year's conference, it has been around since 2002, when the New York Times began offering news by RSS feeds for the first time. Learn more on the history of RSS.
Some of you may already know what a RSS feed is and how to use it. But for those of you who do ...
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A recurring theme in instructional design seems to be that of instructors who are hesitant to try online teaching and learning. Even though online teaching and learning have been around for well over a decade and a half, from K-12 to university graduate level studies, there are still many who are skeptical of this "method of instructional delivery." The business world has built large digital delivery methods for their farflung employees with mostly automated non-instructor-led courses.
Yet, in many areas ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
07 March 2006
In instructional design, a lot gets left unsaid in terms of underlying theories and implications of the learning object. Instructors who meld both teaching and instructional design probably have the best of both worlds because they get to test and adjust the learning based on how it plays out in the classroom.
P.B. Joseph and her colleagues' concepts of the cultures of curriculum offer a framework that analyzes the subtext in how a field or course is approached. If ...
Continue reading Questions to Probe the Cultures of Curriculum behind the Instructional Design
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One of my favorite classes to teach has been "Writing for New Media." In this course, my students would find a live client in the (Seattle) community. They would hustle friends, colleagues and supervisors for business. We ended up with a fish restaurant, a local computer business, a coffee shop, an on-campus music group, a maritime museum, a fledgling environmental organization, a music e-zine, and a variety of others. Then, we'd go through the steps of brainstorming, researching, branding ...
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As I sit at my desk and struggle to select a blog name for myself I wonder is it really that difficult to come up with a name that will represent me truly?
My colleagues have really been very encouraging in helping me to figure out my blog name. They have helped me brainstorm on names such as "ID Diva", "Pitch up" and "Metadata". They keep checking with me everyday if I have concluded on anything. To their disappointment I ...
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Value-adding seems to be a fundamental principle of differentiation in the very competitive eLearning marketplace. LMSes have to offer functionality, design, namebrand, and ease-of-use. Many now have content streams by partnering with media organizations, such as Bb with the New York Times. Data inventories need constantly refreshed information and convenience, sort of like wikis today.
The concept of adding "intelligence" with each new information exchange also is a basic one. To do that, people may conduct new research and offer ...
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Building a course for various subject matter experts (SMEs) involves a lot of give and take, particularly when it's design-by-committee. I experienced that at the Boeing Co. when I worked there for two summers as a faculty fellow. I suspect that in this new job in Kansas that such work will involve much the same sort of give and take. So far, my work here has been project-specific site-building and Help sorts of things, but I have yet to ...
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I found myself in an unintended discussion about the nature of blogs last night. I mentioned to my wife what I was going online under the guise of work (spreading the word about online learning, instructional design and community building), and next thing I know we are having a head-to-head about whether anyone is going to bother to read this stuff given the style of writing I am using (kinda a stream of consciousness, quasi-literary style, or in other words ...
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Without further ado, I am going to jump in on our blog before I disappear under the weight of my peer's contributions (that would be you, Erudito Loginquitas!). I have been putting off logging on and posting for more days than I should as I find myself faced with the inevitable deluge of too many tasks and too many projects for the scant little time I have available on any given day. Such is the fate that many of ...
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Please ignore the "SOS" in the title. It's easy enough to fall into hyperbole after days spent re-compiling Help files for an LMS through RoboHelp software (this is the RoboHelp HTML version, for which there is apparently not a technological decompiler). The title should just read "Help," and that should be sufficient. So much time is spent "tricking the machine" to get it to output what is desired. And the Wizards in the system sometimes cause a lot more ...
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One of my colleagues has been struggling mightily to name herself as a blogger. She has an open promise that I'll update and change any references to her based on her new name. She has gone through dozens of different incarnations and tried them all on and discarded them like a heap of hats. Representing "self" in online space is no easy feat. There are about a million ways to be misread and misunderstood. Ideas may ...
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Writing into a silent blog is a privilege for a short time until launch. Then, there will be those who participant and others who hang out silently. This one will be an open-ended question, with a few broad guides.
One of the factors that can cause the most strife in an online classroom is that of values, particularly ethical and moral ones. Students come to the classroom with any number of values influences and ideas, and the same goes for ...
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So there's the burden of the blank screen. It's not a heavy burden, but it's one of weaving content strings to create value (new perspectives, new procedures). It strikes me that in our jobs, we do a lot of repurposing of content, and this may also be true in blogging. We take the stuff of our thoughts and parts of our daily lives, do a James Frey twist, and try to offer something else. We dramatize the ...
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One of the assumptions of online learning has been the controversial theory of different types of learning styles, different intelligences, and different preferred learning situations. While this is by no means fully accepted, this theory does shed light on the need to "deliver" online learning in various ways for a diverse body of students. Learning styles differ among people. Howard Gardner, author of The Unschooled Mind, suggests that all people have "multiple intelligences" or at least seven different "ways of ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
20 February 2006
There has always been a mystique regarding software developers, at least where I'm from. Living in the Pacific Northwest, I met various people from the tech industry---some on the periphery and others at the heart. Those at the heart were the developers and the project leads. They were the ones who could speak to the machine and command it to execute on certain commands, with a deep precision and elegance. That was the ideal, of course, and one certainly ...
Continue reading The Human- Machine Interface and Learning Management System Versioning
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Much in the Accessibility literature deals with technology mitigations and assistive devices. Less has been done on the curricular ways to mitigate for learning disabilities. So far any who are so inclined, this may be an intriguing direction for further research. What is a learning disability? A learning disability entails any combination of the following:
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An online community shares some common traits: a shared purpose, a semi-defined membership, planned and unplanned interactivity and inter-communications, shared resources, shared virtual spaces, a sense of mutual respect and civility and a simulation of the outside non-virtual world.
I was thinking about the Instructional Design Open Studio (IDOS) community here that will hopefully evolve from this blog. Then I looked at some of the research I ran across in terms of virtual communities.
The rules are to not have ...
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So a conference participant asked about what factors would make for a useful learning management system (LMS). This participant never left a business card or a note, so I was never able to deliver the details.
In doing some quick research, I found a great rubric tool from Edutools. However, before I got to this great tool, I went ahead and did a quick brainstorm.
Brand Reputation: The brand does matter in terms of how well they back up their ...
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These past years, various vendors have gotten on the digital bandwagon to create products that might spark the next great round of expenditures. E-books were considered a potential winner. These would be totally digital and usable on various e-book platforms and devices.
If these could be deployed through just the proper reader, people would want to read digitally. If a pop author like Stephen King would support this, these would make print books obsolete. This hasn't happened.
A version ...
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Let me open with a sincere doubt (scary way to start a virtual conversation). I sincerely doubt that cultural neutrality is an actual possibility in digital course design.
The reasons are several-fold. For one, information is rarely culturally neutral. Virtually all information used in education has a human source and springs from a culture and a time. Information has assumptions about world-view and truth. There's a degree of plausible deniability about virtually everything.
Yet, I would say that the ...
Continue reading "Cultural Neutrality" in Digital Course Design
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The Web works its magic now and again. And today it was so for me. I went browsing for information on reusable learning objects after having read my fill of SCORM and Cisco RLO information parts of last week and this week.
I ran across a nonprofit organization called the Creative Commons (started in 2001 by lawyer and author Lawrence "Code" Lessig). This organization strives to build the shared commons body of knowledge through education and releases of copyrighted works ...
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A more socially provocative way to approach this question of curricula is to consider the concept of whether the curricula is "explicit, implicit or null." This question assumes a larger knowledge of the field and curriculum, something else that IDs don't often probe.
What's said? What's not said? What is not even noticed?
Eisner (1985) suggests that schools teach three curricula: the explicit (obvious and stated), implicit (unofficial, hidden, both intentional and inadvertent), and null (non-existing curriculum ...
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Instructional designers never quite get the chance to go into the in-depth assumptions of instructors regarding their curricular culture. We exist often to deal with assignment-level builds, and the theoretical seldom gets brought up. As a matter of fact, one of my interviewers for this present job said that he could count on one hand the times that he's had such discussions in his many years in his job as an ID.
So after his laughter quieted, I thought ...
Continue reading Joseph, et al.'s Six Cultures of Curriculum
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So, a couple years ago when I lived in M. Corp.'s backyard (Seattle), I got to attend a presentation by one of their geopolitical strategists. His name was Tom Edwards, and he was their senior geopolitical strategist back in Apr. 9, 2004. While his ideas relate to a company's global strategies, his concepts have great utility for designing Web pages for academic purposes.
Publishing online to a non-password protected space makes the digital contents open to global perusal ...
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Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross's Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (2nd Edition), Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993) has survived all these years because of solid research methodology and usefulness. Their ideas apply to online applications.
These authors differentiate between the different types of information one may want to know about learners, and then they offer unique insights about the different types of measures. Their book is a must-have for an ID's library.
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So Angelo and Cross (1993) have some essential questions for instructors to consider before they build an assessment.
Begin with "What do you want to know? Is it assessable?" Consider, "What's the best way to surface this information with the most efficient use of both student and faculty time?" Consider, "What is the most fair, objective and efficient way to gain this information?" Consider, "How will I use this information to enhance student learning? Will this assessment benefit student ...
Continue reading Initial Points to Consider in Creating Online Assessments
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What are some general student learning outcomes in mediated education? There are certainly field-specific ones.
Evolve a greater sense of community and teamwork for constructivist learning and student retention
Promote a stronger sense of individual identity and self-expression, self-discovery
Support a professional field-specific mindset and commitment to values and ethics Master high technology (for learning, for research)
Develop more analytical, problem-solving, synthesizing, holistic thinking, inference drawing, creative thinking, application of logic, differentiation between fact and opinion skills
Understand and practice ...
Continue reading (General) Student Learning Outcomes in Mediated Education
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So the strategy in this blog is to at least get some essential postings linked to the Table of Contents. This blog structure is making us think in "sticky" ways, to connect the thinking pieces. We're still in the early phases of designing the look and feel and the back end (thanks to Josh W. and Andrea M.), so the main job for the bloggers is to work on content. So it's on to repurposing content. The assessment ...
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One of the cooler branches of business research and online applications has been that in virtual teaming. In 2004, Jill E. Nemiro's Creativity in Virtual Teams was published. Other works (J. Richard Hackman, others) have certainly engaged very practical issues of virtual teaming. It struck me that even if this issue hasn't been purposefully addressed that most of us in our work have "virtual teamed". Mediated by technologies, we have worked with others for certain end means maybe ...
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There are a number of federal laws that deal with the issue of accessibility and websites. When I used to teach "Writing for New Media" at a college in the Pacific Northwest, my students would come in well-armed with firsthand observations about the challenges of disabilities and any number of strategies on how to design sites (often from scratch) that were accessible and welcoming to those with various combinations of disabilities. Various software makers have built accessible templates. Technologists have ...
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So our campus is discussing the use of mobile student response systems for use in classrooms. Apparently, some early adopters have been using such systems for years, including some with custom-made software on HP devices. There's a push now to establish some campus-wide standards, so all the units on campus that need to support this technology can be on board.
We brainstormed a massive list of desirables in whatever technology would be chosen. These included things like cost, technological ...
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Feb. 22, 2006 (Wed.) 11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. K-State Student Union 212
Join the discussion as we review the research comparing online to face-to-face instruction. Bring examples from your own teaching and questions for your colleagues as we cover the trends and transitions from traditional to digital education.
Presented by Ben Ward, Swasati Mukherjee, and Shalin Hai-Jew, Office of Mediated Education
For more on IDT Roundtables, please go to the following site: http://ome.ksu.edu/id ...
Continue reading IDT Roundtable Feb. 22 Online vs. Face-to-Face Instruction
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Research has a funny way of informing work if one actually goes out in pursuit of new ideas. For some, we've got research coming to us through subscriptions to listservs and the occasional trek to the library and the use of online databases. I ran across a small gem in Patrick E. Parrish's "Embracing the Aesthetics of Instructional Design" from Educational Technology (March - April 2005). This author suggests that instructional design should take on some pragmatic aesthetics. Like ...
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The contents of IDOS may not reflect the opinions or policies of the Office of Mediated Education or Kansas State University. This blog is offered here for information only, and this information is used at the readers' own risk. Outbound links from this site do not indicate advocacy or verification of any other site's contents. Any trademarks or registered marks used here do not indicate any permission release from the trademark holder and are owned by the respective ...
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The Instructional Design Open Studio consists of three instructional designers out of Kansas State University's Office of Mediated Education (OME). Their identities for this purpose will be: "Instructions Not Included--Ben Ward" "ID Alochona" and "Eruditio Loginquitas" The purposes of IDOS include the following, but these are only the objectives that we own up to.
We certainly have other motives as well. The purpose of Instructional Design Open Studio (IDOS) is to bring together a community of digital instructional design ...
Continue reading Welcome to Instructional Design Open Studio (IDOS)